There was a coolness between the boys when they parted. There was no-one at the gate to Cochecabana but Francis when his dad, Mr. Stapleton, arrived. This caused him to raise a curious eyebrow, but he made no comment after asking Francis if he had had a good time.
‘Yes, thanks.’ The terse reply discouraged further enquiry, and so the matter was dropped. At school on Monday, the boys avoided one another. They never spoke to each other again, not even when Francis left the school two months later, when his father was unexpectedly posted back to London.
In all of his farewells, the only ones he could clearly recall in the years to come were those to Allen Mainwaring, a classmate and kindred spirit who had arrived from California too late for them to become the closest of friends; Miss Davenport, his form mistress, and a shy, chubbily pretty girl called Silvana, who had admired him from a distance and presented him with a choice of cards, one of which read ‘Remember Me’ and the other, with the picture of a frog on a lily pad on the front, asking ‘Where Is My Prince?’ He accepted both gratefully, and, recklessly, gave her a hug and a kiss.
A curious coincidence brought Francis together with his past many years later in Havana. He had left his wife and children at the beach in the Veradero resort near the city, and had gone in search of a camisa guayabera, a formal Mexican shirt worn untucked and distinguished from lesser shirts by four pockets and two vertical pleats running down the front and back. He had been told he could find any number of them at a Friday street market. As he crossed the street, he was hailed by someone who recognized him, although the white-haired stranger was not at first familiar to Francis.
‘Well, bless my eyes! Francis Stapleton!’
‘Who– oh, Mr. Mainwaring! How–’
‘Steve, please.’ He shook hands warmly. ‘I recognized you immediately from your mother’s Christmas card, with all the family on it. Boy, there’s a lot of you now! It’s been a long time.’
‘It has. How are you? How’s Allen? Does he still like Washington?’
‘Very much. Let’s find a table. D’you have time?’
‘I do, yes.’
Steve had come to Cuba from Texas on what he called a quixotic mission. The only place he could locate a part for his vintage Packard at a reasonable price was in a seedy back street off the Malecon, in a crumbling former hotel now sorely in need of restoration.
‘Found it on the Internet. Amazing place. Tried GM, car buffs, everywhere. No dice. Then I discovered they machine or re-manufacture everything here– the guys are engineering geniuses. But they’d have to be: look how they keep these old tubs running.’ He pointed to a sixty-year-old Chevrolet Bel-Air taxi as it rattled noisily past. ‘For a while, the Russians helped them breach the embargo; now, of course, it’s the Chinese.’
‘How did you get here? I thought Americans–’
